“Attitude is a state of mind.” –billboard for unknown women’s clothing store, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

P.S.  Boy, do I seriously wish I had a digital camera.

Today’s second installment of what has apparently become an ongoing feature brings us further advisories, in over the transom:

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE IS UNTENABLE

By re-analysing Heisenberg’s Gamma-Ray Microscope experiment and the ideal experiment from which the uncertainty principle is derived, it is actually found that the uncertainty principle can not be obtained from them. It is therefore found to be untenable.

Read the rest of this entry »

As SIGGRAPH is happening practically in my backyard this year, and as I’m working on trying to get this INP off the ground (and could thus use all the imagination-stimulation I can get), I’m planning on taking a little spin down to San Diego next week.  This is, however, my first SIGGRAPH, and I’ll take all the advice from the more experienced I can get:  what’s worth seeing/doing/hearing/playing with?  What’s the best use of my time there?

Between now and then, I’m headed to Louisiana for a few days, to see my parents and their new boat.  And during the time I’m here, there will be the desperate attempt to cram a week’s worth of work into two days, all the while ignoring the fact that the calendar is telling me it’s nearly August.  Thus, posting may be a bit light over the next little bit.  I’ll be back soon, though, with reports from the field.

In a big hurry to get some non-blogging work done today, so I’m going to beg off by steering you all to Rory‘s thoughts on the manipulation of intellectual property laws by scholarly publications and the difficulties said manipulation poses to a scholar who takes his/her web-presence seriously (not to mention one who wishes to promote the web’s early raison d’être as a means of making research freely and easily available to the scholarly community):

I want to see that happen, yet in my own day-to-day practice have been holding back, in case I have to publish in journals which won’t consider submissions that have already appeared online (most of which don’t publish freely to the web either). So: I can’t put my work online before print publication, when it has the highest chance of appearing topical and fresh and sparking interesting discussions with my peers; and I can’t put it online after print publication, because someone else will own the copyright and want to rent it back to my university library; so in effect, I can’t put online academic work which is all about working as an academic online in order to discuss its implications online with fellow academics.

He’s come to some interesting and provocative conclusions—ones that I hope more fellow academics might pursue.

The conversation about David Weddle’s anti-film theory screed has continued over at the chutry experiment, and Jason and Anne‘s comments, as well as Chuck’s response, have prompted me to think a bit about the role of “theory” in contemporary humanities scholarship and teaching, and whether that relationship needs rethinking.

One of the things that frustrates me—both about the at times unnecessary obfuscation in much contemporary critical work and about the dismissive responses of mainstream writers to that kind of difficulty—is that both point to (at least if I’m thinking through this clearly, after an insufficient quantity of caffeine this morning) the same phenomenon:  the devaluation of the humanities within the academic economy.

The blind adherence to “theory” (and let me here disclaim:  I consider myself to be a theoretical adherent, though hopefully not a blind one, and not one who has sacrificed a readable style to a theoretically correct vocabulary) has in part been produced, I think, by a need within the humanities to demonstrate our curricular and scholarly value by proving our “rigor.” This need for rigor, for precision, for difficulty, is driven by the necessity, in the contemporary academic universe, of competing with the sciences, both for funding and for students.  Thus we wind up with a deep concern for methodology and much less concern for the interpretations that such methodologies are, one assumes, intended to produce.  All of this, I think, is meant to keep administrators and students from mistakenly believing that literature and art and the other humanities are “pleasure” courses, meant to fill in the gaps in an otherwise science- and social science-driven curriculum.

The same devaluation of the humanities, I think, is paradoxically operative in the mainstream dismissals of all such attempts at rigor in said humanities; as we repeatedly point out, no one in the mainstream media writes or speaks so dismissively of even the most abstruse work done in the sciences.  Even the most odd pockets of theoretical physics rarely receive anything but awed responses in the press, as there’s an assumption that (a) folks in the sciences take reality, rather than representations, as the basis for their work, and (b) such work, however bizarre-seeming, is aimed at the improvement of human existence.  The idea of “research” in the humanities presents itself as nothing but bizarre to the mainstream, who seem to want courses on literature, art, and film to be about one of two things:  either “appreciation” or production.  Otherwise, (a) you’re reading too much into something that’s just a novel/painting/film, and (b) what’s the point?

Today on MetaFilter:  a link to a report of a Pennsylvania man who, accused of spitting at a police officer, has been sentenced to read To Kill a Mockingbird.  The discussion focuses mostly on those texts with some apparent punitive value, the things they made you suffer through in eighth grade.  But I wonder:  if, as Richard Rorty claims, the social and political value of literature is in its ability to help us build a sense of solidarity with those whose life experiences are very different from our own, is there a better way to frame such a reading sentence?  If the task were not punishment but rehabilitation, what would you assign, and for what offenses?  Or, conversely, what offenses would your favorite novels serve as remedies for?

I resisted posting on this yesterday, in part because I was so angry I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say.  I’m still not sure I can muster a sufficiently articulate response, but I feel I have to take a crack at it.

The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine this weekend ran a cover article entitled “Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology,” exploring its author’s discovery that “film school isn’t what it used to be.” The article begins with David Weddle‘s shock when his daughter, Alexis (who wants a career in film) gets a C on her film theory final at UCSB.  Weddle, determined to uncover the culprits behind this obvious injustice, discovers that the academy has been taken over by jargon-spouting leftists.

Of course, this article is running in a reputable journalistic organ, and thus it must be neutral, even-handed, and fair in its representations of these miscreants.  Weddle attempts to squelch his distaste by presenting his quest as a pair of balanced questions:

Is there a hidden method to these film theorists’ apparent madness? Or is film theory, as movie critic Roger Ebert said as I interviewed him weeks later, “a cruel hoax for students, essentially the academic equivalent of a New Age cult, in which a new language has been invented that only the adept can communicate in”?

All kidding aside—Weddle’s article is so rife with the kinds of anti-intellectualism often found in the mainstream media that it becomes a sort of cliché.  (See, for instance, Weddle’s obvious glee upon finding a recent graduate of the UCSB film program who claims to have succeeded as a location scout for the film industry “despite the film theory classes, not because of them.” See also his pleasure in the crafting of his final anecdote:  students in Edward Branigan’s theory class dozing off!  Doodling!  Whispering amongst themselves!  All while Branigan prattles on, oblivious!) One seriously begins to wonder how the academy got to be the object of fun that it now is, and why our public relations folks keep wanting us to talk to the media, in this environment.

*Roger Ebert, who would know.

I’m working these days on expanding a paper I gave at a recent conference, hoping that it’ll transform in the process into a draft of a chapter of the INP.  This paper focused on Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and its representations of the geography and geopolitics of computer networks, arguing, in part, that the spatial metaphors used to describe network technologies (most obviously, “cyberspace,” but also myriad others such as the “electronic frontier” and the “city of bits”) have the inadvertent effect of undermining the claims that material, lived spaces make on the lives of those who support the network’s structure.

This happens, it seems to me, in two oddly paradoxical and yet complementary ways:  first, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues about the railroad and Lynne Kirby extends to thinking about film, the development of the twentieth-century technologies of transportation and communication had the phenomenological effects of compressing time and space, bringing once impossibly distant locations into contact.  By this argument, it is suggested that network technologies eliminate space by making such contact both global and instantaneous; moreover, where there is no distance, there is no difference, as the boundaries and borders that mark the difference between “here” and “there” in the era of the nation-state dissolve in the network’s inclusive embrace.

The other argument is precisely the Howard Rheingold/William J. Mitchell/John Perry Barlow remobilization of spatiality in thinking about the network itself.  By this argument, there is a there there; as Rheingold wrote of the WELL:

It’s like having the corner bar, complete with old buddies and delightful newcomers and new tools waiting to take home and fresh graffiti and letters, except instead of putting on my coat, shutting down the computer, and walking down to the corner, I just invoke my telecom program and there they are.  It’s a place. (9)

Through the simultaneous functioning of these two lines of thinking about “cyberspace,” lived spaces come to be deemed irrelevant and their impingements on contemporary lives are absorbed instead by the network, which seems to create a “space” equally real as and far more relevant than that of physical geography.  Stephenson seems to suggest throughout Cryptonomicon that we are too quick to dismiss the demands of lived space, particularly given the geopolitical disparities between those who participate in the network and those who construct the hardware that supports it, indicating that the metaphor of the “electronic frontier” is an apt one not because of its spatiality but because of the colonialist impulse sublimated within it.

That’s the paper/article/chapter’s argument, anyhow.  I’m left with a few questions, though:  is there a way that we can conceive of “cyberspace” without resorting to the spatial?  How might we reconceive the structures and transmission of information in (in?  Is that another spatializing?) the network without coopting—and thus undermining—the terminology of the geographical?

Since my fantastic meeting with George a couple of days ago, I’ve been thinking more about my plan to fold a group blog into one of my fall classes.  George helpfully alerted me to his post on Conversation as Game, which attempts to create a beginning typology of rhetorical moves that take place in public discursive settings, as a preliminary stab at thinking through the thorny question of grading such blog participation.

The class I’m thinking about is, appropriately enough, entitled “The Literary Machine,” and it focuses on the relationship between computers and writing, both as represented in “traditional” print literature (i.e., Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 and John Barth’s Coming Soon!!!) and as enacted in newer electronic-literature technologies.  So what I want the class blog to do is both serve as a venue for standard sorts of extra-class discussion—a site where students can direct one another to texts of interest on the web, and where those late-night thoughts about in-class discussion can get an airing—and also function as an experiment in computer-based writing/publishing itself.  With any luck, my class (and I) will be able to puzzle through some of the questions I raised here about the new kinds of writing that the blog might help facilitate, and the new directions that the thing we currently think of as “literature” might take in response.

The question:  have you had any experiences—positive, negative, mixed—with this kind of blog-experiment that might help focus or guide my fall foray?

Bill reports that he’s been having some difficulty loading the Planned Obsolescence front page, and this reminded me:  back during our European vacation, I had some intermittent difficulty as well.  On my hotel’s Wintel machine, running some recent version of IE, I periodically got the front page loaded only as far down as the right-hand column extends (and thus the older entries in the left-hand column were cut off).  It didn’t happen all the time.

Anybody out there having this trouble?  Anybody know whether there’s anything I can do about it?